Education for Social Change

Click here to access article by Dan Chodorkoff from Institute for Social Ecology.

We face an unprecedented crisis of global dimensions, an interlinked social and ecological crisis. The survival of life on earth as we know it requires new thinking and creative solutions. Those solutions will only grow out of an educational process  – and it has to be education of a particular type.

The first half of the article goes into great detail about how the educational system serves to prepare students to function in a capitalist society. It offers valuable information on how the ruling capitalist class shapes educational policies to perform this function and to limit any thoughts about the system itself other than those which support it. Then, he makes this statement:

Certainly there are oases around the world; there is a free-school here or a free-school there. But in general these noble experiments are isolated and the number of children that they reach is extremely limited.

Hence, I was looking forward to ideas about how an education for social change could be established within such a society to serve a large number of students. It turns out that this otherwise excellent examination of class determined education in the US was merely a warmup for a pitch to sell the Institute's school. So, I think you can probably ignore the last half of the essay.